It’s a fascinating process, this watching your life gradually drain away at a constant rate, day after day, project after project, person after person, holiday after holiday, memory after memory.

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I’m getting paid for hours on end at a very good rate to do mindless labor that a computer could do in ten seconds, if only they’d let me install and use the tools.

The only people who say that there’s no real difference between a Windows shop and a Unix shop are clueless Windows users (and companies) who are willing to spend tens, or even hundreds of thousands to have humans do what they think computers just aren’t capable of doing (or what they can’t afford the software to do)… the same things that the Unix guys can do from the command line with standard tools in just a few keystrokes.

“Visual Computing” ala the Windows world is just another term for “simplistic waste of resources.” Imagine if you had to do all of your communication with other human beings in diagrams, pictures, lines, and other visual elements. Can a picture book ever do a novel justice? Want to explain Weber to someone in a series of diagrams?

Yet the only computing paradiam most people know or believe possible (or want to work with) is the visual paradigm from Windows. They’re bothered somehow by the Unix paradigm of communicating with your tools using words and sentences — verbs and nouns and qualifiers and prepositions — even though humans have for tens of thousands of years known that verbal communication is not only more efficient, but is infinitely more flexible and powerful, than visual communication.